Monthly Archives: October 2011

Canto: The New Font from Font Bureau

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Canto Typeface SamplesAlthough I may not have enough knowledge to be considered a font nerd, I’m certainly a fan (I leave the nerding to other members of the Looseleaf team). Last week I got an email from Font Bureau announcing its newest font family: Canto, designed by Richard Lipton.

I’ve gotten a few announcements from Font Bureau since I joined its mailing list, but Canto is the first new release that really piques my interest.Check it out. Look at the PDF sample. Look at closeups of the different options. Elegant, fun stuff. I’d love to see the bold brush style on a book cover somewhere. The optional swashes (like the fancy N in and at the bottom of the snippet I show in this post) and optional ligatures give it a lot of diversity and plenty of options for titles. (Look at the Canto characters sheet to see what each character looks like and what the optional characters bring to the table.)

Canto is a bit like Trajan, which is probably a typeface more of you are familiar with, only it has more options and an organic touch.

For any of you who aren’t familiar with professional fonts, no, Canto is not free for download. Richard Lipton and the other folks at Font Bureau need to make a living too, and I’m sure this beauty took a good chunk of time and effort. It is available for purchase, and you can buy individual styles or the whole family. If you’re an indie author looking for a brand font, Canto wouldn’t be a bad option to look into.

Weekly Roundup: 10/22–10/28

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Guido Henkel: Amazon Introduced New Kindle eBook Format with a Major Misstep

Guido Henkel points out that Amazon’s new Kindle format isn’t supported on older Kindle devices. Amazon certainly isn’t the first to roll and update like this, but that doesn’t make it ideal. I know it’s not exactly the same situation, but when Sony updated its bookstore so all books came in ePub format, Sony paid for my ereader to be shipped to their shop and given and upgrade so the new format would work on my clunky, archaic device. I really appreciated that. It’s a bit annoying when you pay a company for a piece of their hardware and then that company releases updates that can’t apply to your device.

Christopher Priest: Are You Watching Carefully?

Christopher Priest writes an article about the genesis of The Prestige for Fantasy Magazine. I greatly enjoyed The Prestige, so it was fun to read this bit of background on the novel.

Intelligent Editing: Consistency Mistakes

Intelligent Editing shows the most common consistency mistakes that writers make in their manuscripts. Consistency helps your reader understand you meaning; when you switch between hyphenating or capitalizing a phrase or not, you signal a change in meaning to your reader. If you don’t actually intend a different meaning, you end up confusing your reader. Being aware of common inconsistencies helps you avoid them yourself.

Mike Shatzkin: Can Big Publishers Actually Do Tech and Make Books at the Same Time?

Mike Shatzkin discusses some changes rumbling through the big publishers: they’ve started to get into the tech game. But his article’s title raises an interesting question: can and should publishers be splitting their attention between books and technology? This applies as much to Amazon as it does to traditional publishing houses. Can you have core competencies in both stellar technology and stellar content?

Prose Tip: Simultaneous Syntax

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Quill-and-ink writingWhen fiction writers come to me and ask me to add some spit shine to their prose, there’s a pair of problematic sentence constructions I’m almost guaranteed to run into (nonfiction writers also use these construction, but not as often). These two constructions are grammatically correct, and sometimes they are appropriate to use, so they’re hard to catch. But once you know what to look for, it’s fairly easy to keep a wary eye out for these sentences when you’re revising your work.

These sentence constructions center around
–ing words and as. Permit me two examples:

  • Pulling out her red pen, she sighed.
  • As her eyes hit another –ing sentence, she reached for a match.

The Problem

As you may have noticed, and as I’ve already pointed out, neither of these two sentences is grammatically incorrect. As far as correctness goes, they’re completely sound. The problem with these two sentence types is twofold: 1) you’re making some of your action subordinate to other action, and 2) you’re making two actions simultaneous.

Subordinate action. The first issue is kind of like the argument against passive voice: these constructions minimize action and weaken the impact. As editors Renni Browne and Dave King* say:

Both these constructions take a bit of action … and tuck it away into a dependent clause. … This tends to place some of your action at one remove from the reader, to make the actions seem incidental, unimportant.

If that’s what you intend to do, then you have no problem; using these constructions will be just what you need.

Simultaneous action. The second issue is something you should consider any time you use one of these two constructions. The syntax of these sentences means that both the as or –ing clause and the other clause happen at the same time. In my examples, she pulls out her red pen and sighs at the same time. That’s not a problem. The problem arises when your characters start doing impossible simultaneous things.

  • Pulling on his shoes, he ran out the door. (You can’t run and pull on your shoes at the same time.)
  • She pulled open the door, climbing the stairs. (Unless the staircase is really short, it’s unlikely she can open the door at the top while she’s climbing. Alternately, if the stairs are on the other side of the door, there’s no way she can climb them while she’s opening the door.)
  • Jumping astride the horse, he tucked the trinket into her hair. (I’m not even sure what this guy is doing, but I’m pretty sure it can’t be done all at once.)

Lesser Problems

The other problems with these constructions exist mostly because the constructions are difficult to use properly. The subject of your sentence needs to come immediately after the comma (i.e., Jumping astride the horse, he tucked the trinket into her hair; not Jumping astride the horse, the trinket was tucked into her hair) and you need to punctuate them properly. If you don’t set it up right, then not only are impossible simultaneous things happening, but generally impossible things are happening (how the devil does a trinket jump astride a horse?).

Even if you use them properly, be wary of using these constructions too often. They’re just unconventional enough that they stick out a bit, so if you overuse them your writing starts to draw attention to itself (instead of the story) and it begins to feel false.

The Cure

The cure for these constructions is a pretty simple one: don’t use them. Here are all my examples reworked:

  • She pulled out her red pen and sighed.
  • Her eyes hit another –ing sentence: she reached for a match.
  • He yanked on his shoes and bolted out the door.
  • She pulled open the door and started climbing the stairs.
  • N/A (The last sentence was too messed up for me to fix without knowing what’s going on, and I didn’t think through my example that far. Is the horse a she? Is there another she on the horse?)

If you use one of these constructions, consider whether or not you mean what you’re saying. Is the –ing or as action really subordinate? Do both actions really happen at the same time? If the answer to both questions is yes, then using one of these grammatically correct methods is perfectly all right. But as I mentioned before, be wary of using them too often, even if you use them correctly. If it starts standing between your reader and the story, even the most elegant prose needs to meet either a red pen or a match.
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*This quote is taken from Self-editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne & Dave King. I highly recommend this book to writers who want to do all they can to polish their work before handing it off to an objective eye (whether that’s a reader, a publishing house editor, or a freelance editor).

Image by Simon Howden via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Looseleaf Editorial Philosophy

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Looseleaf Freelance EditingEvery writer works differently—there are a lot of similarities between many writers, but no two work the same way or come up with the same end products. Similarly, every editor works a little differently. Even when it comes to copyediting, different editors do things differently. When you, as a writer, are looking for a freelance editor to help you with your work, it’s important that you find one that fits you.

In the spirit of giving you all the information you need, allow me to give you a rundown of the Looseleaf editorial philosophy. There are three main principles: editors exist to help writers be better writers, words need to communicate to and capture a reader, and books belong to their writers.

Editors Exist to Help Writers Be Better Writers

There are some services out there that exist to help make books better. However, Looseleaf isn’t about taking a manuscript and making it into an awesome book. It’s about working with a writer on a manuscript to help make that writer a better writer. The manuscript will become a better book as a result, have no doubt about that, but my primary focus as an editor is to help writers do what they want to do, only better.

This means that when it comes to changes bigger than commas or colons, I’ll be writing comments to you, the author, so you can understand why I thought a change was necessary and why what I did fixes the issue. I’ll expect that if you don’t understand my comment (or if I made a change you don’t understand because I forgot to comment on it) you’ll ask me to explain myself. I expect to be available for questions during and after an edit.

If you want to hand your manuscript over, have it polished, primped, primed, and packaged into perfection by someone else, Looseleaf may not be for you. Make no mistake: I’ll be digging in and doing as much tinkering, tweaking, and fixing as I can to make your vision a reality. As it says on the Looseleaf home page, “We’ll help you achieve the clarity, credibility, and style you need to reach your audience.” But my primary goal will be to help you be better, not just your book.

Words Need to Communicate to and Capture a Reader

Looseleaf editing is very reader-centric. If there’s something you like to do in your writing that isn’t strictly correct but will still communicate and carry your credibility to a reader, I’m not going to touch it. If it’s something that will make a reader think you don’t know what you’re doing, or that will force the reader to read your words more than once to understand them, I’m going to recommend a change.

This means that many “rules” are flexible. For a hyper-formal, scholarly audience, I might recommend that you don’t split your infinitives (i.e., “to boldly go” would be changed to “to go boldly”); in a young adult novel, I won’t touch your slang unless it’s so heavy I think it will make your book sound dated in two or three years, or that you won’t be able to get any crossover audiences with it. I will always be considering your reader, not just the rule book.

Books Belong to their Writers

Some writers fear editors: this minority considers editors to be a group of people who meddle with a creative individual’s work and take it away from the creative source and beauty it originally had. However, I subscribe to the mentality described by legendary editor Maxwell Perkins:

I believe the writer … should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.

Everything I do to or suggest for a manuscript exists to help you and the reader communicate more effectively. You have ideas you want to communicate; your reader wants to engage with and receive those ideas. I will make suggestions and explain the reasoning behind them; I’ll tell you why they should be made. But the final decisions always belong to you. Because you’re the one with something to say; I’m just here to help you let that idea loose.

Image by markuso via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Weekly Roundup: 10/15–10/21

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Page from the Book of KellsChristopher Butler: How Disregarding Design Limits The Power Of Content

This is a pretty long article from Christopher Butler that talks about how design can shape and inform meaning and interpretation. It’s especially relevant today when design is so fluid—ebooks change from device to device, etc. Butler points out that the problems with fluid form aren’t problematic for everything, but fluid form does present limits that are problematic in some instances.

Kevin Canfield: Can Harper Perennial Reinvent Publishing?

In this article Kevin Canfield examines how Harper Perennial is staying nimble and relevant in today’s publishing climate. It’s a good look at how publishers can adapt to the opportunities available today.

New York Times: Authors to Get Sales Data Online From 3 Big Publishers

The New York Times reports that three big publishers are implementing online access to sales data that they will release to their authors. This is a great change, in my opinion. Authors have been a bit starved for information in many situations—that’s one of the appeals of epublishing. Changing that discrepancy will strengthen publishers’ positions in the market.

Duolit: Get Noticed: 5 Steps to Boosting Book Publicity

The team over at Duolit gives out five key points for publicizing your book. Their tips help you look professional and prepared. Another piece of their advice—having your publicity plan figured out before you publish—is key to publicizing your books properly.

Writing Excuses: Endings

Writers often get a lot of advice about starting out and beginning, but advice on endings is a little harder to come by. Lou Anders returns to Writing Excuses to discuss sticking your novel’s ending.

Sedate Your Inner Perfectionist During First Drafts

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Dirty paper rough draftMany aspiring authors struggle to get through their first drafts. This is understandable. You have a brilliant idea, and your story is going to be more than a mere book. It will be a Book of monumental influence and exposure. The trouble is, once you get started on the actual draft, you’ll start seeing flaws, holes, and weaknesses throughout your prose and plot. This will be especially true for any of you who are committing to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November.

Completing the NaNoWriMo challenge requires you to write 50,000 words in a novel during the month of November (technically you are supposed to complete a 50,000-word novel, but many novels run much longer than that). To accomplish that feat, especially if you’re someone with a day job, children, or a full-time student course-load, you’re going to be churning out a lot of crap and filler words—there’s just no escaping it.

Why Crap is Kosher

The thing is, that’s okay. Regardless of how quickly you’re writing, your first draft is still going to contain a lot of crap. That’s what your own revisions, critique groups, and editors are for. First drafts should follow the advice of editor Maxwell Perkins: “Just get it down on paper, and then we’ll see what to do with it.”

Incidentally, Maxwell Perkins is a legend of editing and publishing. He edited and published writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. If the editor of immortal, canonized authors says you really need to just spew your ideas out and think about it later, why should you insist otherwise?

There are a few writers who can turn out nearly impeccable first drafts. However, they are probably aliens. While you’re writing your first draft, cling to your humanity and allow yourself to make mistakes, fumble through troublesome scenes, and throw in a few clichés. It won’t kill you or your story.

How to Sedate Your Inner Perfectionist

When you’re writing your first draft, pattern your #1 rule off Perkins’s advice: Just get it down on paper. Sedate the perfectionist living in your mind and lock him or her in a closet until you’ve written “The End” for the first time. You can use several perfectionist sedatives. You’ll probably have to brew up a particular concoction that suits your particular perfectionist, but here are a few ideas.

Write like you’ve already fixed the problem. When you recognize a fatal flaw in your story, make a conscious decision to write like you’ve already fixed it. For example, if you realize you need a new character, or you need to merge two or more characters, start using the new character right now, even though he or she hasn’t been introduced earlier in the draft. While I was in Brandon Sanderson’s writing class, he explained that this is part of his writing process. In his first drafts, he pretends he’s already made the changes he needs; his first revision consists of going back and filling in those changes. Pretending you’ve already solved the problem can keep you calm, which helps keep your inner perfectionist deep in dreams of neatly organized pencils.

Keep careful notes—away from your draft. If you know you’ve used the word “chilly” approximately 6 million times in a particular chapter, instead of taking the time to go back and replace all your frigid adjectives, make a note of it in a separate document or in a separate notebook. Keeping notes will reassure your inner perfectionist that even if he or she is experiencing nightmares during sedation, there will be a way to straighten everything out when hibernation ends. If you have a list of flaws, it’ll be easy to trek through them in your first pass of revisions, but you don’t have to spend time and lose momentum fixing them in the first draft. Storing that list separate from your draft keeps you from thinking too hard about the flaws while you’re creating.

Display a motivational phrase. Sometimes all you need to keep your inner perfectionist asleep is a comforting lullaby mantra you can chant when you see flaws. Try displaying Maxwell Perkins’s advice close to wherever you write. Maybe you need something more direct, like “Crap is okay … for now.” These sorts of phrases are useful because they remind you that now is not the time to stress about how many syllables you put in the last sentence; they also don’t advise you to settle for less than you’re capable of. Choose a phrase that reminds you that this is step one, and that the first step in a marathon doesn’t need to be perfect.

You’ve got time to make up for stumbles and implement second thoughts during later drafts and revisions. You are capable of writing a Book, but your first draft doesn’t need to be anything more than a draft.

Image by anankkml via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Blogging for Fictioneers

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Lately there’s been a bit of hoopla surrounding blogs that belong to fiction writers, or writers that expect blogs to be a means to building a platform. Last week Roni Loren shared a post in which she rants about blogging, and she sums up the arguments and annoyances several people have voiced about author’s blogs. When you’re a fictioneer, what should your blog be doing for you?

Reasons to Blog

There are a few reasons why a writer would decide to blog:

  • To gain personal validation by whispering (or shouting) into the interwebs
  • To engage in a community
  • To gain exposure (i.e., build a readership platform or name recognition)
  • To drive sales

If you’re posting when you feel like it, responding to comments when you have them, and commenting on others’ blogs, you’ve got the first two reasons down pat. It those are the only two you have in mind, you’re golden. But if you want the last two, you’ve got to think about the way you blog a bit more, and you may need to do things a little differently than you expect.

One of the main gripes about writer blogs that Loren addresses is that writers who blog about writing are only engaging other writers, and many aspiring author blogs devolve into something nearing drivel. If you are blogging to reach readers, you need to be writing posts that appeal to them, not your critique group. You should also make the content engaging, not just whatever you were thinking that day. Illustrator and art director Jon Schindehette points out that random madness will not engage a readership/viewership, even if eclectic posting makes you feel better.

Reader-focused Blogging

If you want to engage a readership and not just the writing community, you need to write posts aimed at your target audience. To do that, first determine what about your writing will appeal to a reader.

  • Do they like action? Write about your favorite action sequences in film or about martial arts, explosions, or weapons.
  • Are they into crazy science? Write about the bizarre bioluminescent chemical recently discovered in a deep-sea fish or dark energy.
  • Is your writing in a specific genre with an active fandom? Review other pieces of work in your genre or talk about what makes the genre great.

For example, for a couple of years now I’ve had an idea for a story about a spice caravaner and a cook. Spices feature prominently, as does food in general. I know that if I were to write and publish this story I would share recipes for meals in the book, spicelore, and spice-related history on my blog. It relates to my story and it relates to readers.

There are plenty of other things I could write about for that story, and there will be plenty of reasons why readers will be engaged in your novel. You don’t have to pick just one.

Balanced Blogging

Does everything need to be reader focused? Heck no! You should be yourself, and if you’re a writer, you think about writing. But you should consciously include posts that talk about things your readers like and things they want to know or hear. In my example, I wouldn’t necessarily need to start a dedicated food blog where I posted nothing but bizarre things I’ve learned about cinnamon. But I’d do food-based posts occasionally, because it would be relevant to my readers and could be shared with non-writers who have not read my books. I’d engage with non-writers who are interested in those topics (i.e., I’d expand my “engage in a community” reason for blogging beyond the borders of book creators).

The things you share can widely vary. They might be video games, other books, movies, annotations to your stories, poetry, sailing, science, spacecraft, or cooking. If the ideal reader for your book would enjoy it, write it. Then share it.

When someone who has read your book comes to visit your blog, that reader is looking for you, so you shouldn’t smother who you are or what you think about. Just curate your thoughts and target them. If you want to try to engage new readers with your blog, you have to keep in interesting for someone who reads the sort of things you write, but who doesn’t know you or have an interest in writing his or her own novel.

Balance your blog: express yourself, but target those expressions. Meandering blogs soon see readers meandering away. Balance your focus: if you’re a fiction writer who also blogs, you should make sure you’re not putting more weight on your blog than your fiction. Unless you’re a blogger first and a fiction writer second, you shouldn’t allow your online activities to overshadow your stories when you’re creating. Stories reach readers; occasionally blogs help the stories get in readers’ hands.

Weekly Roundup: 10/8–10/14

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Kern Type ScreenshotKern Type: A Kerning Game

This may not appeal to many book people, but type nerds will appreciate this kerning game from Method of Action. From the game instructions: “Your mission is simple: achieve pleasant and readable text by distributing the space between letters. Typographers call this activity kerning. Your solution will be compared to [a] typographer’s solution, and you will be given a score depending on how close you nailed it. Good luck!”

Tony D’Souza: When to Stop Working on Your Book

Novelist Tony D’Souza describes all the work and years he put into his manuscript Voyage of the Rosa … and then explains how he let it go and started something else. Letting a book die is something many writers have a problem with. Having an objective eye to help you know when to let something lie is a huge benefit. Indie publishing means anything can be published, but not everything you write is something you should sell. D’Souza explains how his masterpiece became a monster; maybe his story can help you avoid similar pitfalls.

Amazon: Amazon Launches a New Imprint

Amazon is launching a new science fiction, fantasy, and horror imprint called 47North, and has announced the first run of titles.

Rose Fox: Someone at Amazon Launches a Speculative Fiction Imprint

In light of the 47North announcement, Rose Fox expresses concern that nobody seems to have stepped forward to claim the imprint from an editorial standpoint. She raises questions over whether or not the editorial side has much genre experience. She sounds a bit hostile (and she admits that she is), but she raises some good points regardless.

Stacy Whitman: FAQ: Muslim Protagonist

Editor Stacy Whitman of Tu Books answers a question from one of the writers submitting to her. The writer wonders if a Muslim protagonist isn’t relatable enough for a widespread audience. This writer really shouldn’t fear: he or she is submitting to Tu Books, which has the great goal of adding diversity into YA and middle grade science fiction and fantasy. In Stacy’s words: “When we say ‘about everyone, for everyone,’ we mean everyone. Except maybe Sauron.” In her post, Stacy focuses on what makes a character more or less relatable. Especially when you’re dealing with speculative fiction, that doesn’t mean your reader shares a background with the character.

Carolyn McCray: “Price Pulsing”

Over at Digital Book World, Carolyn McCray gives some Amazon-sales advice in her article, “‘Price Pulsing’: the Benefits of Dynamic Pricing on Amazon.” She describes a method of temporarily lowering your price for promotional purposes to boost you in the Amazon rankings before you put your book back at retail price. It’s essentially a sale, but McCray explains the strategy behind the sale.

Leaflet Review: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

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Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel KayUnder Heaven’s book jacket copy:

To honor the memory of his recently deceased father, a general who led the forces of imperial Kitai in its last great war twenty years before, Shen Tai has spent the two years of official mourning alone at the isolated battle site, burying as many of the unnumbered dead lying there as he can. The dead are equally Kitan and their Taguran foes; there is no way to tell the bones apart, and he treats them all reverently. At night Tai can hear the ghosts moan and stir, and occasionally, when one voice falls silent, he knows it belonged to someone he has laid to rest.

Both sides respect his solitary work and take turns bringing him supplies, and it is during such a visit from a Taguran officer that Tai learns powerful forces have taken note of his vigil. The White Jade Princess Cheng-Wan, seventeenth daughter of the Emperor of Kitai, sent west after this last battle to seal the peace with Tagur, is pleased to present him with two hundred fifty Sardian horses. They are being given to him, she writes, in royal recognition of his courage and piety and of the honor he has done the dead.

You give a man one of the legendary Sardian horses to reward him greatly. You give him four or five to exalt him above his fellows, propel him toward rank, and earn him jealousy, possibly mortal jealousy. Giving him two hundred fifty is unthinkable—a gift to overwhelm an emperor.

Tai is in deep waters. He needs to get himself—and his own emperor—back to court alive. Riding the first of the Sardian horses[*] and bringing news of the rest, he starts east toward the glittering, dangerous capital of Kitai, and gathers his wits for a return to his forever-altered life.

Under Heaven is the first book I’ve read by Guy Gavriel Kay. It’s not your typical kettle of fantasy—far from it. While I was reading, I tried to articulate Under Heaven’s flavor … and failed miserably. However, Kay conveniently inserts this into the book’s epilogue: “Every single tale carries within it many others, noted in passing, hinted at, entirely overlooked. Every life has moments when it branches, importantly (even if only for one person), and every one of those branches will have offered a different story.”

The book fully illustrates this idea, and it illustrates it well. There are many places where the plot takes a different turn than what you would expect from a typical, trope-laden book, and most of those differences are driven by a character choosing a different branch, even though that choice may seem insignificant at the time. This is an interesting concept, and Kay explores it well.

That said, I didn’t fully enjoy Under Heaven. For many, many chapters at the beginning, I felt that the viewpoint characters withheld information in an infuriating manner. Two characters would talk and come to a decision, then continue talking and taking action, but I wouldn’t learn what the decision was for another chapter or so. This deliberate withholding irritated me as a reader.

I probably could have overcome this problem, since it’s relatively minor. However, I ran into the same problem with Under Heaven that I had when I was reading The Good Earth in high school. The way the men in these books (who are also the main characters) think of and treat women sickens me, and I have a hard time sympathizing with them. The main character, Tai, is a decent individual overall. However, there is more than one instance in which his views towards women make me want to punch him in the face, so I have a hard time casting him in a good light when I’m constantly concerned that I’m going to want to punch him in a few pages.

All in all, this means that Kay accomplishes a good verisimilitude of ancient culture. There were many cultural institutions that were so normal that they didn’t register as cruelties or hypocrisies when they were used by upstanding citizens. Tai is better than most (if not all) of his peers. He is simply a man of his cultural moment. That doesn’t change the fact that institutions in that cultural moment irritate me.

It boils down to this: Kay does a wonderful job of telling the story he sets out to tell. It’s just not a story I was readily receptive to. There were many aspects that captured my interest, there were several characters that fascinated me, and I was happy to read the book all the way through to the end. I can even think of people I’d recommend this book to without reservations. But for me and my tastes, I’m glad I bought it during the liquidation at Borders and not at full price.
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* I would like to mention that this first horse only serves an important role for a few chapters. After that it basically fades to the background and is pure scenery. These Sardian horses instigate the plot but have little hand in it.

Before You Hire an Editor, Know What You Need

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Edited Prose PathWhen you start thinking about hiring a freelance editor, you need to decide what type of editing you need right now. It’s also good to know what types of editing you’re going to want in the future; sometimes you can work with the same editor through the whole project, or you can at least work with people your editor refers you to.

You need to know what type of editing you need because editors are not wizards. You can’t take a book you think isn’t quite there, hand it off to an editor, and get it back magicked into complete perfection. Editors can help you improve your writing and hone your craft, but they can’t force absolute quality on you. The clearer you can be about the type of help you want, the better an editor can help you. An editor cannot effectively edit everything from commas to character arcs all in one go (if an editor says they can, what you’re going to get will be okay at best, and never excellent).

Writing a story or nonfiction piece means creating a path from beginning to end, and ideally that path will have scenic vistas and exciting sights to see along the way. Editing involves trying to make that path clear and enjoyable for your reader. If you take the path-making metaphor a bit farther, you’ll understand why you can’t have someone do story-level developmental editing and sentence-level copyediting at the same time. You don’t hire a lumberjack to pull weeds; you don’t hire a golf-course divot-fixer to move boulders. Understand the task you want to hire out so you can hire the right person.

Developmental Editing (Story Editing)

Developmental editing is large-scale editing. In this type of editing the editor makes sure there are no redwoods blocking the path you’re trying to create for the reader. It also includes pointing out any opportunities you may have missed. Perhaps you could have pulled more tension out of a character’s relationship; maybe you ignored an argument your opponents will make; then again, maybe you just have a big plot hole or lapse in logic. A developmental edit involves multiple editorial passes and a lot of editor–author interaction to hone and develop your plot or argument, tone, characterization, and more. This is the lumberjack-and-boulder-removal level of editing. If a developmental editor also tried to do copyediting along the way, he or she could easily miss some uncharacteristic dialogue because he or she was more focused on the punctuation of a nonrestrictive clause.

Learn more about developmental editing from this Looseleaf blog post. Another editing service that is related to developmental editing is the manuscript evaluation or critique.

Substantive Editing (Line Editing)

Substantive editing goes into more fine-tuning than moving boulders: it’s more like clearing the path of hedges and shrubbery and making sure it’s as direct as possible. Substantive edits cover organization, logical flow, word choice, internal consistency, and more. It can go as big as reordering paragraphs and as fine as tweaking a word to sustain your tone. Often a substantive edit can include a lot of copyediting because it is more sentence- and word-based than developmental editing. However, it should not be confused with a true copyedit. Substantive editing involves a lot of tweaking, reordering, and decision-making from the author. By the time the edit is done you’ll have changed a lot of text, and any time you make lots of changes you need to go back and make sure the details of those changes are clear.

Learn more about substantive editing from this Looseleaf blog post.

Copyediting

Copyediting looks at the potholes and pebbles along a manuscript’s path. The editor shifts word and punctuation debris so readers won’t twist their ankles while enjoying your story. Everything gets edited for grammar, spelling, punctuation, style, consistency, and adherence to your chosen citation format (this could be everything from the color of your characters’ eyes to how you capitalize certain words and phrases). Sometimes copyediting isn’t necessarily a right-or-wrong type of thing. There are some language scenarios in which you’ll have more that one option. It’s a copyeditor’s job to make sure you remain consistent in which option you choose.

Learn more about copyediting from this Looseleaf blog post.

Proofreading

Proofreading is a lot like copyediting in that it’s concerned with potholes and pebbles. However, a proofread is performed on the final version of a publication. It should always be done by someone who hasn’t previously edited your work (Looseleaf uses some trusted subcontractors to do the proofreading on projects I’ve already edited). The proofreader catches last-minute errors and items that you, the author, would change yourself if you had your attention drawn to them. Proofreaders also catch formatting errors like over-spaced lines, misplaced hyphens, widows and orphans, word stacks, and inconsistent typeface use. Anything that will disrupt the reader’s final experience gets caught during proofreading.

Learn more about proofreading from this Looseleaf blog post.

An Editorial Relationship

If you want a long-term working relationship with a particular editor, make sure you can get all the types of editing you’re going to need from that editor or from professional acquaintances of that editor. By working with one individual or a collection of close contacts, you’ll be better able to retain your vision and voice across the different stages of editing. For example, when I hire out final proofreading on projects I’ve edited, I review the proofreader’s changes to make sure they don’t go back on anything the author and I have previously talked about. This helps retain the author’s intentions and goals for the project.

Before you hire, know what you want. You’ll be happier with your final product and you’ll save a lot of negotiation with your editor if you can articulate what it is you want him or her to do.

Image by Rob Wiltshire via FreeDigitalPhotos.net